How does a Jew discovering the Americas benefit the Spanish regime when the Spanish Catholic monarchy precisely kicked all Jews and Muslims from the peninsula with their ill-named "reconquista"? If this turns out to be true, then it'd be rather ironical.

Presumably this Lorente has more evidence he hasn't put on display, so it isn't completely baseless either.

It's certainly sketchy and not very scientific, though, per the same criticism outlined in the article.

I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.

OTOH there's well known and documented anti-Spanish propaganda during the centuries by basically the rest of Europe (Protestants specifically), so I start to doubt claims from both sides (disclaimer: I'm Spaniard):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend

There’s also the phrasing “compatible with Jewish origin”. That doesn’t mean that he definitively has Jewish DNA either, especially given that there are no specifically Jewish haplogroups. This whole thing seems very premature until autosomal analysis is performed.

As a person with Jewish ancestry from the Italian peninsula in the 15th Century, I can say there are some other issues with this.

All of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish.

And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.

I've read the new in spanish, it was not just labeled as jewish but as sefardic jewish line (the one particular from spanish jews). Most of them converted to christianity (the called "new christians") and remained in Spain.

On the other hand, Jewish were expelled from the whole italic peninsula (including Genoa, etc) after very extreme period of persecution 2 centuries earlier.

> Being Jewish, and having some Jewish DNA: are they the same thing?

Judaism is based on matrilineal descent, so depending on where the DNA comes from, yes.

> This was even after the Jews heavily funded the Spaniard military in the conquest of Gibraltar.

To be fair, it was also after they aided the initial Muslim conquest of Spain and assisted the new Muslim rulers in subjugating the native Christian population.

The purpose was to convert most of population to christianity to achieve cultural unity, and the ones who wouldn't convert had to leave. Usually it is explained only as an expulsion of the jews.

P.D: there are many theories around Gibraltar, specially since it was during succession war and the country was in a civil war.

I don’t think anyone besides a few Spanish and Italian ultranationalists are interested in claiming Columbus’s “accomplishments.” Any evidence of Columbus being Jewish is mostly interesting for anthropological and historical reasons, not chest-beating ones.